Tennis Form

Tennis is an odd sport. It's a sport in which a great deal of emphasis is put on form. Compare it with, for example, baseball or softball. In those sports nobody gives a hoot about their form when swinging the bat or throwing the ball. They're just focused on hitting the target. It's the same in basketball.

Most people learn tennis with some formal instruction, if only through free Recreation Programs as children. But most people learn these other sports in pickup games as kids. They get very little instruction.

A coach may later come along and teach a kid to get more arc in his shots or adjust her batting stance a bit. But this is nothing compared to the instruction tennis players get.

Now, if you go around the world and watch people play baseball, softball, and basketball, you will notice few variations in form among them. They all swing and throw and shoot pretty much the same way.

But if you go around the world and watch people play tennis, you'll see no end of extreme variation.

What's more, at the lower levels of the game, you'll notice that form is often unnatural, rigid, and downright awkward.

For example, pay attention to how many people you see playing tennis while somehow managing to never bend their knees. Or their elbows. It's true, isn't it? People are that tight, that un-spontaneous, and that inhibited in their movement while playing tennis. Why?

How anyone can run on legs with no knees I don't know, but watching it reminds me of Big Bird. In fact, you see people all over the place out there playing stiff-legged and stiff-armed. They look clutsy, don't they? Rather like robots whose joints need oiling.

And it isn't just recreational players and at the club level. Where the pro tour lacks real depth, as farther down the doubles draw or lower down in the women's draw, you see some pretty bad service motions.

Which means that problems with form are so common we find them that high in the game.

Why?

I dare say the problem is too much instruction. On form that is. But also, tennis lends itself to a kind of superstitiousness about form. That's because making a good tennis shot is a very difficult thing to do. One-third of tennis shots are so far off target that they go out or into the net.

So, you have a game in which every nice shot is somewhat of a miracle. People think that if they can just perfect their form, that ball will start going in.

Wrong. The incorrect assumption is that errors are caused by bad form. Wrong. Errors are caused by what the racket did to the ball during the few milliseconds of contact. You can use perfect form and blow the shot or use lousy form and hit a beauty.

Form is just efficient. It just eliminates the superfluous so that less can go wrong. It just reduces the risk of error. That's all. There's no magic in it.

When playing tennis becomes an exercise in executing forehands and backhands, it stops being fun. Why? Because it stops being a GAME then.

The GAME's the thing.

You should almost never be thinking about form while playing a match. You should have your head into the GAME instead. Which is an athletic game of chess.

Tennis is much more fun, exciting, and interesting when you are there. So, be thinking about strategy and tactics, not form.

AND look at your errors. I mean really look at them. How far out was that last shot? An inch? A foot? Notice. Where exactly did you aim it? Most people unsee these things, but if you take note of them, you will automatically correct for them. That will do far more good in reducing your errors than thinking about your form will.

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